To the alarm of some nuclear safety advocates, owner Constellation Energy is laying the groundwork for restarting Three Mile Island's inactive Unit 1 reactor with recent tests. Closed in 2019, Unit 1 sits next to the former Unit 2 reactor that partially melted down 45 years ago. The company recently told investors that it is weighing its relaunch, a process that could take several years.
“We found the plant to be in pretty good shape,” CEO Joe Dominguez said in an interview. “We believe it is technically possible to restart it.”
Not long ago, the nuclear power industry was consumed with shuttered plants, many of them sunk by an inability to compete financially with natural gas and highly subsidized wind and solar power. But Three Mile Island is part of a flurry of fresh activity at mothballed plants as tech companies, manufacturers and energy regulators struggle to find enough zero-emissions electricity to keep up with growing demand.
Elsewhere, the owner of the mothballed Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan plans to have it back up and running by the end of next year, and energy company NextEra is considering whether to restart a nuclear plant in Iowa. should be done Meanwhile, owners of operating nuclear plants are scrapping plans to retire them, instead drafting regulatory applications to keep them operating for up to 80 years in some cases.
The shift is being driven in part by clean energy subsidies secured by the Biden administration. But states are also jumping on the nuclear bandwagon: Across the country, several bills are moving forward to provide incentives to the industry. Illinois, West Virginia and Connecticut were among a half-dozen states that lifted bans on new nuclear plants.
“We're in a very different environment than we were a few years ago,” said Doug True, chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group.
Nuclear is still a gamble. Safety concerns, supply chain issues and engineering challenges have kept projects on schedule and over budget. At Georgia's Vogel nuclear plant, the first new reactors in the United States since 2016 recently came online seven years late and about $20 billion over budget. An attempt to build a similar reactor in South Carolina collapsed.
But energy companies are now seeing increasingly favorable economics in nuclear plants. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, which promotes artificial intelligence innovations and other tech, data centers are predicted to eat up 9 percent of the U.S. electricity supply by 2030, their share of electricity demand today. is a three-fold increase. Booming manufacturing and interest in electric vehicles are driving additional demand. This has touched off an unprecedented quest for zero-emission power by tech companies.
NextEra CEO John Ketchum said talks with tech companies led him to restart the Dwayne Arnold Energy Center, Iowa's only nuclear plant, until it closes in 2020 under financial pressure. Does not close. on the budget,” Ketchum told Bloomberg last month. He said tech companies coming to him are trying to build data center campuses that require as much power as the city of Miami.
NextEra said in a statement that the company is “always looking at the needs of our customers and the best use of our assets, including the Duane Arnold Energy Center.”
According to Patrick White, research director of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a think tank, more than a dozen nuclear plants have shut down in the United States over the past decade, and most of them are beyond the point of being potentially restarted. . Their reactors have been decommissioned, their other infrastructure dismantled or left to rot.
But elsewhere, White said, the equipment could still work if regulators approve powering it. That's a gamble in Michigan, where the previous owners of the Palisades plant near Grand Rapids shut it down in 2022, saying the electricity it produced was too expensive. It was sold to Holtec, a decommissioning firm that bought the plant with plans to manage its retirement after 50 years of operation. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) asked the new owner if the plant could be revived.
“We said, 'We're going to put the plant in a state where everything we do can be changed,'” said Patrick O'Brien, director of government affairs and communications at Holtech. Now, Holtec hopes to have the plant generating electricity again by the end of next year.
Not everyone is rooting for Holtec. The Michigan chapter of the Sierra Club calls the plan to subsidize Palisades' reopening with $1.5 billion in federal and state funds “foolish and expensive,” arguing that the plant's energy costs would be higher than wind turbines or It is done by solar panels. While there are no plans to dispose of radioactive waste from any of the nuclear sites, many environmentalists say much of it will be stored at the plants if regulators sign off on extending their life spans.
There are also concerns that in the rush to restore and extend the lives of nuclear plants, regulators are being pressured to overlook the potential safety risks of regenerator equipment that in some cases existed before the Carter administration. is of Earlier plants were expected to live up to about 60 years. But Dominguez said most of the plants' components, other than the reactor vessels and cement, have been replaced and updated.
Nuclear safety advocates fought back. A bill recently passed by Congress that expands the mission of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees safety, including safeguarding the financial health of the industry, has accelerated lobbying by nuclear power interests. Amid intense lobbying for approval of the license.
Edwin Lemon, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the U.S. is “taking our aging reactors into uncharted territory.” “Cutting corners on nuclear safety and raising the risk of a Fukushima disaster in the U.S. is not a winning strategy for building public confidence in the technology.” Radiation releases at the Japanese plant following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami triggered a reckoning on the scale of nuclear power after the Three Mile Island accident.
But the industry is at odds with fewer environmental groups than in the past, as large wind and solar projects face cost overruns and delays, raising concerns that more nuclear power will be replaced by gas and coal. is heavily polluting the K plants.
“It's not something we anticipate,” O'Brien said during a panel at a recent industry conference in Las Vegas, where he said Holtec is also being asked about a plant that could open in 2021. I had one closed in New York and one in Massachusetts. Closed in 2019. “It's not just Palisades. Now at other plants that we're closing down we're being asked, 'Can you restart Indian Point? Can you restart Pilgrim?' Maybe. We cut the reactor. But does that stop us from installing new reactors? I don't think so.”
Holtech is one of many companies racing to develop smaller, more nimble reactors that the industry has been trying to bring to market for years, amid intense regulatory and engineering hurdles. If they're ultimately successful, the site of an operating or retired legacy plant is an obvious place to build them, O'Brien said.
Some New Yorkers lamented the 2021 closure of Indian Point near New York City after years of pressure from environmentalists. The state was unable to obtain enough clean energy to replace the electricity it produced, forcing New York to revert to gas generation. Emissions increased according to Environmental Protection Agency data.
“It's very painful to see 'forever' zero-emissions electricity disappear from your waistline,” said Ben Furnas, former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's climate director and now executive director of the 2030 Project at Cornell University. “This could be a lesson for other places,” he said.
Constellation Energy CEO Dominguez emphasized that the company has not made a decision about restarting Three Mile Island, but called it a shutdown. A major mistake that undermined the nation's climate goals and energy security.
“We are exceptionally confident in the reactor,” Dominguez added Other components are in “excellent shape”. He said he believed the company could complete all construction and licensing again within about three years of committing to a restart. Initial testing has focused on the steam generator attached to Unit 1.
But critics say Three Mile Island's history is impossible to ignore. Equipment malfunctions and operator errors put 2 million people at risk of radiation exposure when a loss of coolant caused a partial meltdown in Unit 2 of the plant. since then, Fuel from the reactor and debris from its destroyed core have been moved to the Idaho National Laboratory.
Despite assurances from the Department of Energy that “there were no injuries, deaths, or direct health effects from the accident,” many in the area have contested the finding, which they believe is the government's were more exposed to radiation than admitted.
“It was like a war zone,” recalled Jim Fry, mayor of the Borough of Royalton, who was working as a police officer at the time of the 1979 incident. “They didn't tell people what was going on. It was a scary time.”
His concerns about the plant, however, like many others in the community, faded as the plant's Unit 1 continued to operate safely. When it was closed in 2019, it had operated for 45 years. Now, Fry says he would welcome a resumption, which he said most people in the city think is a “done deal.”
Not everyone in the shadow of the plant is willing to give it another chance. If Constellation goes ahead, it will find itself at war with nuclear safety activists like Eric Epstein, founder of the group Three Mile Island Alert, who insists that restarting would be a dangerous boondoggle.
“How many times will the industry reinvent the broken nuclear wheel, and demand another bailout from taxpayers?” They said.